An Irish Tragedy
We have a major problem here in Ireland.
While the rest of the world frets over minor trivialities such as Brexit, Mexican walls, Federal shutdowns, yellow vest protests and other such fripparies, we have a disaster in the making here.
We have pre-paid travel cards called Leap cards and apparently people are worried that their names are being misspelled on them.
In Irish, the acute accent [known as a “fada”] on a vowel comes into play, so that “a” is different to “á” and people are complaining that the accents are missing. The likes of Liam Ó Maonlaí are complaining that their name appears as Liam O Maonlai and they are distinctly unhappy about this. After all, they can see those fadas on their computer screens so why can’t they see them on their Leap cards?
This is front page news, and is likely to rival previous tragedies such as the suspending of ferry services to the Aran Islands and the lack of broadband in Ballykissmyarse.
Naturally this will become an issue of major debate and will probably see millions being spent rectifying the problem. It wouldn’t surprise me if there will be a judicial inquiry over the whole fiasco as well. We love judicial inquiries over here and have several of them running at any one time.
And the rest of you thought you had problems?
The horror of it all.
Doesn’t it just put everything into perspective?
Too much fucking perspective.
loardy loardy and I though my name misspelled with a K instead correctly with a C was a big deal…I best stop my whinging
But the Leap card is only seen by themselves and inspectors. Don’t they recognise their own names without the fada?
Obviously not.
Heck, I didn’t even know the things were called fadas until now. And my computer OS may have the ability but I don’t have a clue on how to do it (set the language to “Irish” or Gaelic or something?). I wouldn’t even know how to pronounce “Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh” for that matter.
Iggerant ain’t I?
“Fada” is the Irish for “long”. It lengthens the sound of a vowel. “La” would rhyme with hah, whereas “Lá” would rhyme with paw. There endeth the lesson for today
Fripparies, fada and ballykissmyarse are now my new favorite words.
And my new name is Dávid Ní Rhodes.
Despite the fact that my line hails out of Scotland, but I was born a ‘merican and we’re really good at cultural appropriation.
Nah! Dávid Ó Rhodes. Unless you’re female? One can never tell these days.
There’s a place called Bastardstown in Ireland. No, really.
There is indeed, in Wexford. A friend of mine actually moved there. She died since. Probably from embarrassment.
Dear goodness Grandad, what a catastrophe. VICTIMS! More victims. Maybe they could sue? Well, at least we are now aware of them. That’s good, yes?